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About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Henry Smith of Sleeping Beast Games, developer of the local multiplayer technobabble game Spaceteam, ran a Kickstarter this year with the goal of raising enough money to keep him going while he improved Spaceteam and made games to be released to all for free over the course of a year. That campaign failed at 81% funding with about 1,400 backers, but he's running a second Kickstarter with the same goal. Alongside the current Kickstarter campaign, which runs until July 7th, he's also running a worldwide Spaceteam tournament to promote it.

The improvements planned for Spaceteam are accessibility options that allow for changes in game difficulty, new translations into Russian and Hebrew, and and special features exclusive to members of the Spaceteam Admiral's Club, also known as the people who back the Kickstarter. Once that is complete, he plans to work on a game called Blabyrinth. Blabyrinth is to be a cooperative local multiplayer game (much like Spaceteam) in which players must work together to find treasure in a labyrinth. Once that's been released, he plans to start production on a third game, a single player game inspired by the board game Galaxy Trucker and called Shipshape.

The Spaceteam Admiral's Challenge is running until the end of the Kickstarter campaign and invites players to achieve worldwide high scores in several different categories. Completing certain achievements during the campaign will also unlock special in-game rewards. There are also real-world local events set up in North America, Europe, and Australia. Full details can be found on the Admiral's Challenge web site.